* * *
There were no Ombud alerts waiting for us and no visible emergencies as we drove back to the town house. We were grateful forthat. But we were still wary, because we knew they were coming. We knew the wind, as Claudia said, would blow ill.
We found Lulu and Alexei at home, snoozing at the dining room table. The cat lay on the back of a couch in the den, her legs sprawled and her eyes wary.
Lulu lifted her head, sniffed. “You smell like…moldy cotton candy.”
“And rotten lettuce,” Alexei added. “Why?”
“Fairies,” I said, “who, if I have the math right, believe the magical pulse was a temporary boost in the ley lines. And did their best to eat the magic.”
“Eat the magic,” Lulu repeated as if hearing a foreign phrase for the first time. “Directly or…?”
“Fairy food,” I said. “Ale, meats, whatnot.”
“Yum,” Alexei said.
“Not if you gorge until you’re unconscious and you nearly destroy your own castle,” I said. “The line was quite a way back from where they actually stopped.”
Connor poured a glass of water for himself and handed me a bottle of blood, and we sat down at the table.
I cringed at the label. “Nobody asked for wintergreen.”
“We need to order groceries,” he said. “You’re down to the last bottles.”
The bottles I’d been avoiding, he meant. I was fairly certain there was a bottle of “vanilla musk” in the back of the fridge.
“How was the parental dinner?” Lulu asked.
I opted to condense the torture and drank the blood all at once. It made my mouth tingle. And not in a good way. Fortunately, the bottles weren’t very large and didn’t take long to ingest. Maybe the big providers thought two-liter bottles of blood would be objectionable to humans? Which was illogical, given that keeping vampires well-fed kept us off humans.
“Larger than expected,” Connor said. “It turned out to be an extended-family dinner.”
“It looks like you survived,” Lulu said.
“Everyone was very kind,” I said. “Even when we ate the raw deer in the backyard.”
Alexei’s eyes went wide. “Did I seriously miss that?”
“No,” Connor said. “We ate meat loaf at the table like humans.”
“But there were pies,” I said. “Pies as far as the eyes could see.”
“Good reason to get engaged,” Alexei said with what I was pretty sure was sincerity.
Lulu got busy inspecting her screen. Which was turned off.
“How’s the mural coming along?” I asked.
“Good progress,” Lulu said, and held up her hands to look them over. They were mostly clean, but for a few patches of color. “Clint’s awesome, as I expected.”
Clint Howard was Lulu’s boss for this project; he’d hired her specifically to paint a mural.
“Good,” I said.
“I totally got us off track,” Lulu said. “You said Claudia believes the pulse was in the ley lines?”
“Yup. And no one blew up a ward.”
